DFKI-LT - An HMM-Based Speech Synthesis System applied to German and its Adaptation to a Limited Set of Expressive Football Announcements

Sacha Krstulovic, Anna Hunecke, Marc SchröderAn HMM-Based Speech Synthesis System applied to German and its Adaptation to a Limited Set of Expressive Football Announcements3 Proceedings of Interspeech, Antwerp, Belgium, 8/2007

The paper assesses the capability of an HMM-based TTS system to produce German speech. The results are discussed in qualitative terms, and compared over three different choices of context features. In addition, the system is adapted to a small set of football announcements, in an exploratory attempt to synthesise expressive speech. We conclude that the HMMs are able to produce highly intelligible neutral German speech, with a stable quality, and that the expressivity is partially captured in spite of the small size of the football dataset.classes of speaker identity, the target application being the synthesis of emotional speech in German.